


Creation Stories

by somehowunbroken



Series: Burglary [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:50:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somehowunbroken/pseuds/somehowunbroken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For hc_bingo: 'undercover: discovered and hurt.' Also for au_bingo: 'alternate history: personal life of a character changed.' Burglary 'verse, set after Again and Again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Creation Stories

“So, what made you decide to get into the detective business?”

Cam tries to glare, can’t figure out which John to focus on, and goes for a groan instead. “You want to get into that now?”

John shrugs, leaning back against the wall of their – cell? room? Cam isn’t sure – and looks at him. “You got something better to do?”

“Escape,” Cam points out, but when he tries to sit up, John’s already by his side, pushing on his shoulder. Cam hisses as the world goes fuzzy at the edges and slumps back down. John stays beside him, nimble fingers probing the knot on the back of Cam’s head.

“You went down pretty hard,” he says quietly. “You were throwing up before. Do you remember?”

Cam shakes his head and immediately regrets it, and all of a sudden, throwing up sounds like a great idea. He leans to the side and retches, apparently for the second time.

“You probably have a concussion.”

Cam almost nods before he remembers, right, vomiting. “Yeah,” he rasps instead. “Probably.”

John’s hands dance across his forehead in a soothing motion that Cam isn’t sure John knows he’s making. “You need to stay awake,” he tells Cam. “You’ve been out for a while, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to let you go back under with a head injury like that.”

“Okay,” Cam agrees. He doesn’t really have the capacity to argue at the moment, and it sounds vaguely familiar, like he’s heard that before.

“So what made you want to be a detective?”

“Always wanted to be one,” Cam says, turning his head into John’s touch. “Since I was a kid. Five, six.”

“Too much Magnum?” John teases, voice low as he settles next to Cam and pulls his head into his lap. Cam sighs and leans back, closing his eyes. He opens them quickly when John gently taps on his cheeks. “None of that.”

Cam dutifully keeps his eyes peeled. “My father was a detective,” he says. “He’s always kind of been my hero.”

“Daddy was a cop, so you are too,” John muses. “Cute.”

Cam tries for a grin. “Truth, justice, and apple pie,” he drawls.

“Nice,” John smirks back. “So you wanted to grow up and be your dad, huh? Did you want to marry a nice girl like your Momma, too?”

Cam laughs. “I never wanted to marry my Momma,” he says. “I love her dearly, but sweet mercy, I’d never survive being married to a woman like her. She’d beat me black and blue.”

John raises an eyebrow. “I can, too,” he points out.

“Haven’t yet,” Cam retorts, then winces as his vision flickers. “This might count, actually.”

John’s face creases in a frown and his worried hands return. “I didn’t do any of this,” he reminds Cam as he checks the bruise on his head again.

“Your contact, your fault.”

John’s lips quirk into a humorless smile. “Not my fault if your acting skills suck, Mitchell.”

Cam shrugs one shoulder infinitesimally. “Cop through and through,” he says. “It goes against the very fiber of my being to act like an art thief accomplice of yours.”

“I’m hurt,” John drawls. “And here I thought you liked spending time with me.”

“Off the job,” Cam says as firmly as he can, “absolutely.”

John huffs out a quick laugh and settles his fingers in Cam’s hair. Cam struggles, but his eyelids are sliding closed again.

“John,” he says quietly.

“Cam?” John’s voice is more worried than Cam thinks the situation deserves.

“I’m going to pass out again,” he says, and does.

-0-

There’s no way of keeping track of time in a windowless room if you aren’t wearing a watch, so when Cam comes to, he’s not sure how long he’s been out. His head is still resting in John’s lap, and John is running his hands absently through Cam’s hair as he stares at the wall. Cam frowns. If his hair is long enough for John to do that, it needs to be cut.

“Welcome back,” John says above him.

“How-” Cam’s voice cracks, and he licks his dry lips. “How long was I out?”

“An hour,” John estimates.

“They haven’t come back?”

John’s lips twist into that funny little half-smirk. “Nope.”

“And why is that amusing?” Cam wonders if he can try sitting up, but he’s not sure he wants to attempt it yet. His stomach feels empty, but that’s a theory better not put to the test.

“If they came back in here, they’d either take you or me with them.” He pauses. “Well, they’d try.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Don’t know how well that would go.”

Cam raises one eyebrow successfully. “Is that so?”

“Well, if they tried to take you while you were like this, I’d beat them bloody,” John says with an easy detachment that has Cam believing him beyond any shadow of doubt. “And if they tried to take me away from you right now, I’d beat them bloody with their own arms.”

“Violence isn’t the answer,” Cam quips.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” John throws back, and they grin at each other. “So, you wanted to be a detective like your dad and you didn’t want to marry your mom. What else?”

Cam sighs; they’re back to Twenty Questions. “Well, I didn’t want to be just like my dad,” he says after a minute. “He’s the reason I got into law enforcement, yeah, and I wanted to do right by him, but I wanted the story to end differently.”

John’s silent for a minute. “I assume you’re not still talking about your mother.”

“No.” Cam shifts his head to the side and is happy to note that his vision isn’t swaying as much as it had been. “When I was nine, there was a shooting. Some drunk hobo knocked over a convenience store, started waving a gun around.” He pauses. “Paralyzed from the waist down. Been in a wheelchair ever since. He was the lucky one.”

John whistles softly. “Damn.”

“Pretty much,” Cam agrees, and he doesn’t know how to express his gratitude that John isn’t offering I’m sorry or any of the other useless, bullshit platitudes that he’d heard over the years. He just continues, instead. “Of course, there’s the other matter, too. Everyone was convinced I was gonna marry this girl Amy. Dated her on and off through high school.” He shrugs. “She didn’t want to be a cop’s wife, and I didn’t really want to be an interior decorator’s husband. We split right after graduation.”

“Hmm,” John says noncommittally.

Cam grins up at him. “Never saw myself with the trophy wife and the kids after that. You grow up, your tastes change.”

“That so?” John leers down at him.

Cam nods slightly, mock-serious. “Find I’m partial to redheads with huge tits now,” he deadpans, and John rolls his eyes. Cam closes his eyes for a second and grins.

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” John snarks.

“Oh, honey, don’t go changing just for me,” Cam drawls right back. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

“Perfect’s pushing it,” John replies, but he’s smiling now too.

“What about you?” Cam asks, because he’s asked before, but he’s mostly just gotten eye rolls or the finger in response. “What made you decide on a life of crime?”

“I’m retired,” John says mildly and, okay, points to thievery for the fact that an art thief as good as John could retire at forty.

“Only recently,” Cam points out.

John nods and stares at a point in the wall. “I stole a pen from my father’s office when I was six,” he says eventually. “It was one of his favorite pens – not a fancy one or anything, but a reliable one, one that he liked enough to refill instead of getting a new one when it died. I wondered what it was about the pen that made it so interesting to him, so one day I just ran in and took it, right off his desk while he was in the bathroom.” He shakes his head. “Never did figure out why he was more attached to his pen than he was to me, but I realized that I loved the act of taking the pen from him. It was a rush, some kind of thrill that I couldn’t imagine not feeling again.” He lifts a shoulder, looking down to focus on Cam. “Started small, worked my way up.”

Now Cam’s the one who feels like he should be apologizing for John’s shitty childhood, for a father that valued things as mundane as office supplies more than his own son. He wonders if John’s father is still alive. He’d like to pay the man a visit.

“Damn,” he echoes instead, and John smiles down at him.

“Yeah, well.” The shadows in the room flicker, and there’s a murmur of voices outside. Cam strains to hear them as John tenses, cocking his head. His hands are completely still, resting on Cam’s shoulders as he stares at the door.

The voices pass the room, and John relaxes into his usual slouch. It’s not that Cam forgets that John can take care of himself, that he’s even dangerous, but he thinks about it now, seeing the proof right in front of him. There’s an elegant sort of beauty to John, a lithe grace that helped make him so good at what he did, and his size and lean form make him almost whiplike. Cam imagines him in a fight, striking and evading, back and forth almost rhythmically, almost like a dance. It would be beautiful to see.

“Still with me?” John asks, and Cam blinks back to the present.

“Yeah,” he says. “Help me sit.”

John gives him a doubtful look but does as Cam asks, looping his arm around Cam’s shoulders and leaning Cam into his body and back against the wall. Cam’s half-draped over him and will fall if John moves, but he’s upright, and the room isn’t tilting as much as he’d thought it would be.

“Okay?” John asks, and there’s that worry again, well-hidden beneath a casual tone and slow drawl, but present nonetheless.

“Much better now,” Cam assures him because, really, he is. “Remind me why we’re here again?”

John snorts out a laugh. “Because these morons have information you swore up and down you needed,” he says sarcastically. “And you wanted to get it yourself, so you came with me, but since you suck so hard at acting I had to blow my own cover to save your ass.” He glares at Cam. “I’ll never work in this town again, y’know, now that they know I’m in your pocket.”

“You’re rarely in my pocket,” Cam chuckles. “Pockets aren’t usually involved at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure pockets are far, far away from us most of the time, since we spend a lot of it without clothi-”

He’s cut off by John leaning over to kiss him, and, yeah, he’s sticking his hand into Cam’s pocket at the same time, but Cam doesn’t really care because he feels better right now than he has since he came to in here the first time. John pulls back and leans his forehead against Cam’s, wiggling his fingers from their place in the back pocket of Cam’s jeans. “Pockets.”

“Noted,” Cam says, and kisses him again.

They don’t dare go any further in here, not when they don’t know when someone might burst in, and Cam suspects that John might be favoring his head injury, though he’s feeling better and better every minute. They stay sitting against each other, making out almost lazily, like they’re in Cam’s apartment and sitting on the couch on some lazy Sunday afternoon instead of trapped in a dingy room somewhere in Chicago’s warehouse district. It’s nice, and Cam abruptly thinks that he’s happier right here and right now than he’s been in ages. He’s torn between relaxing into the feeling and having a full-blown panic attack at its implications when there’s a knock on the door.

John springs away from Cam and he slumps to the floor as John crosses the room in three silent steps. He positions himself flat against the wall, just inside the door, and there’s a glint in his eyes that makes Cam think that blood’s about to be spilled. The knock is repeated; it cuts through the haze in Cam’s head this time, and he calls out, “John, wait.”

John stays still against the wall, focusing that intense look on Cam, and Cam raps back against the wall three times. There’s a pause, and then four more knocks in a pattern, and Cam grins and knocks back twice.

“Cam,” Sam’s voice comes through the door, and Cam sees John relax. “Are you okay?”

“Get us out of here,” Cam calls back. “We’re fine.”

“I’m fine,” John corrects through the door to Sam. “He got conked over the head pretty nicely, Carter. He needs medical attention.”

“I do not,” Cam protests, but as he tries to stand on his own he thinks that yeah, maybe John’s right on this one. He staggers, the room tilting crazily back and forth, and John’s right there, sliding his arm around Cam’s waist and taking way more of his weight than in strictly necessary, but Cam lets him because it’s still nice, that feeling of rightness is still there, and he doesn’t mind holding onto it a little longer.

“Stand back,” Sam’s voice comes, and there’s muttering on the other side of the door before a small explosion rings through the room. John has his body twisted around Cam’s before Cam can blink, protecting and supportive, but Sam’s coming through the hole in the wall a second later and rushing to his other side. Together, they haul Cam from the room, and Cam doesn’t try to help them because, he reflects, John was right about the medical attention, and he passes out again.

-0-

When he comes to this time, it’s in a well-lit hospital bed. John’s still there, though, sprawled across two chairs in a way that only he could manage, dead asleep. Cam doesn’t want to wake him, but as he shifts in his bed, John snaps awake. Cam can see the relief flash through his face before John schools it into nonchalance.

“Hey,” Cam says.

“Doc says you’ll be fine in a few days,” John replies without preamble. “He’ll release you now that you’re awake, as long as I promise to wake you up every two hours at home.”

“Home,” Cam says almost dreamily. “Yeah, let’s go home.”

John stands and stretches, almost catlike. “Let’s go home,” he agrees, and he’s out the door before Cam’s brain can catch up with what he says.

Home. Not just Cam’s place, he realizes, not just his apartment any more. It’s home, because that’s where he and John live, their home.

The warm feeling of rightness from before flares in his gut again and he smiles as John walks back in the door, doctor in tow, because in a few minutes, they’ll get to go _home_.


End file.
